Unrelated image from pexels.com to make this post look nicer in social media shares.

No not the architectural style (although I am a fan), I’m talking about taking a break once in a while. I’ve already talked about how churning out work isn’t everything, but it seems like a good time for a reminder. Actually, the ideal time for a reminder would have been last Monday, but I didn’t come up with the idea for this post until last Sunday and it seemed hypocritical to write about how people should take a break by, uh, not taking a break even on Christmas day.

So I hope you did get a break sometime between Christmas and New Year’s Eve and I hope you actually rested instead of pressuring yourself to build a side project or learn something new. If you didn’t get a chance to relax, and not everyone does, I hope you can make some time to relax soon. Not just because working all the time is no way to live, but because rest is necessary if you want to be productive.

At this point I could reel off a list of links justifying the idea that rest is necessary, but that’s really not the point of this post. We all know rest is necessary, we’ve all gone through a crunch at work or poured way too many hours into a college/university/bootcamp project to get it done in time and ended up mentally exhausted and unable to think clearly for days afterward.

The point of this post is to try to convince my readers that it’s okay to take a break. We all know we should, but we put it off and put it off because of the pressure to keep up, to always be coding, to prove that we’re good programmers by grinding ourselves down and sacrificing practically all of our waking hours on the altar of being the best. It’s easy to feel like you’re falling behind, it’s easy to think that everyone else is hacking away every night while you cook dinner and hang out with your friends like a chump, it’s so easy to feel like you’re not doing enough.

Well, programming is all about tradeoffs so let’s talk about tradeoffs. You could spend the vast majority of your non-work waking hours doing more work in the form of personal projects and learning more programming languages, and that would probably make you a better programmer than you would be with less practice. There’s also the fact that practice doesn’t make you better unless it’s the right kind of practice, but let’s ignore that for now. If you generalize a little, I think it is true that more practice is likely to make you a better programmer. But the question is, is it worth it?

Just because you can do something doesn’t mean that it’s worth the trouble or that it’s ever going to be your highest priority. That’s one of many frustrating things about programming that I only learned after I graduated – being able to fix a minor bug doesn’t mean that bug is ever going to be more important to the business than a new feature, so that bug can hang around for years, annoying you every time you see it.

How you spend your free time is a tradeoff like any other in programming – spending that time coding on side projects means you can’t spend it with your friends and family, or going for a walk, or learning how to make pottery or do some basic plumbing or on reading a novel. Of course, if you spend some of your free time learning to dance, that means you can’t spend those hours learning a new technology, so it comes down to what’s worth it to you. And by that I mean what really matters to you personally, not what you think you’re supposed to want, not what your parents want, not what your boss wants, what you want.

And then there’s the available resources part of the tradeoff: you may be able to spend your free time on programming projects at the cost of dumping childcare and the work of maintaining your home and your social life on your (probably female, let’s be honest) partner. That’s a choice you can make, but it’s unlikely to be one you can make and still be a good person.

Is being the best programmer you can possibly be really more important than anything else in your life? If that’s really and truly what you want then go for it with everything you have, but if it’s not, then go after what you really do want and don’t forget that you’re not obligated to want to be the best programmer you can be. Obsession is not required, you’re allowed to be a human being with more than one interest.